Yesterday, in a narrow (and highly partisan) 50-49 vote, the U.S. Senate used the Congressional Review Act to rip away 20 years of hard-won protections for the headwaters feeding Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. An area that just so happens to be one of the most pristine and heavily visited wilderness areas in the country.
The measure, known famously as H.J. Res. 140, passed early yesterday morning with all but two Republicans supporting it. The pair of defectors were Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) who joined Democrats in opposition while Minnesota Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, put on a 5-hour Senate floor clinic in a last ditch effort to gain additional support.
The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), uses the Congressional Review Act to nullify Public Land Order 7917, issued by the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior in 2023. That order withdrew roughly 225,000 acres of federal land in the Superior National Forest from new mineral and geothermal leasing for 20 years to protect the Rainy River watershed, which flows directly into the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park.
The House passed the resolution narrowly in January and it’s now on its way to President Trump, who is widely expected to sign it into law.
At the center of all of the controversy we find Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta, who has its sights set on digging an underground copper-nickel sulfide mine right upstream in the Rainy River watershed. And while the foreign-owned operation is not inside the official wilderness boundary (they love pointing that out), it would operate in the connected waters that flow right into it. Unfortunately for all of us, sulfide mining is risky and has a notorious habit of leaking acid and heavy metals that kind-of-sort-of never really get cleaned up.
On the flip side, the project would bring some high-paying jobs to Minnesota’s Iron Range, all while shoring up a domestic supply of critical minerals used in batteries, electronics, and clean energy tech.
Fair enough, at least on paper.
America needs copper and nickel. But let’s not all be so quickly fooled into thinking that this is some noble domestic mining renaissance. In reality, it looks more like handing a sensitive, irreplaceable watershed over to a company with a track record that includes environmental fines back home in Chile. And what is perhaps most damning about all of this is that it’s doing so by bypassing normal science-based reviews using a procedural trick.
This vote marks the first time the Congressional Review Act has been successfully leveraged to overturn a mineral withdrawal of this kind. Something that is now looking like an awfully dangerous precedent that could make other public lands protections, whether that’s coal leasing in Montana’s Powder River Basin or oil and gas plans in Alaska, vulnerable to fast-track repeal by simple majority votes in the future.
Under the CRA, once repealed, a future administration would be barred from issuing a “substantially similar” protection without new congressional approval, shifting more power over public lands decisions from the executive branch to Congress.
Even with the resolution expected to become law, the Twin Metals mine is far from certain. The company must still jump through a variety of hoops including full NEPA environmental reviews, permitting and the reinstatement of all of their previously canceled federal leases.
Aside from those pesky regs, you can bet there will be a few lawsuits and additional legislation, including the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection Act, hurled their way.
